by Robert Crais
I told her about the things I found in the bush, including the handwritten note.
“Mary Sue thinks it means ‘ask a coyote named Sanchez.’”
“Ask what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it has nothing to do with where she is or why she’s missing, but if she wanted to ask Sanchez something, then I want to ask him, too.”
“The attorney I saw knows about these things.”
“The attorney you saw when you looked into changing your status?”
“Yes. He is an immigration attorney who is sympathetic in these matters. I know he represents undocumented people when they are arrested. I have his number.”
“Okay.”
“Thomas Locano. He was very nice. Here—”
She gave me a number with a Pasadena area code. I asked her to call him. As her attorney at that time, he would need her permission to share information.
“Mr. Cole? I will call the police if you think it is best.”
“I’ve been involved less than five hours. Let’s see what develops.”
“I would give up everything for her, Mr. Cole. Without hesitation. I want you to know this.”
“I know you would, but you won’t have to. Nothing happening now is about you. It’s about finding Krista and bringing her home. The police won’t ask your status, and don’t care.”
“Are you sure?”
Outside, a red Jeep Cherokee pulled into the parking lot and parked beside my car. The man inside did not get out. He waited without moving, dark glasses locked forward, immobile as a statue.
I checked the time.
“Yes. I’m sure. This is why I’m the World’s Greatest Detective.”
“You are trying to make me smile again.”
“Yep.”
“It did not work.”
“I know. But I had to try.”
I put away my phone, and went out to the Jeep. The man behind the wheel looked at me as I climbed into the passenger seat, but said nothing. Conversation was not his strong point.
Pike, Joseph, no middle initial, learned the tracking arts as a boy who grew up at the edge of a logging town, and later refined those same arts when he hunted men first as a combat Marine, then later as an LAPD police officer and a private military contractor in Africa, Central America, and the Middle East. If I was good at hunting men, Pike was better. Pike had also been my partner in the agency since we bought it together, and my friend for even longer.
“Thanks for coming.”
His head dipped once. A two-hour drive, and he had come without asking why, and without explanation.
Now, I told him about Krista Morales, her Friday night at the crash site, and what I found when I walked the scene. I gave him the nine-millimeter brass casings and the spent shotgun shell.
“I found these. Trehorn says people shoot out there, so they might not matter.”
Pike sniffed the brass as if the smell would tell him something, then handed them back. Maybe he could follow their scent.
“I marked Trehorn’s track with an E. The bigger truck is a quad. I want your read on what happened.”
Pike nodded again.
“You want me to take you out there?”
He shook his head. I had already texted him the longitude and latitude coordinates from my iPhone.
“Want Trehorn?”
“I’m good alone.”
“Okay. I’m going to see this attorney. Let me know what you find.”
It was one-thirty-two that afternoon when I left Pike in the desert, and drove to see Thomas Locano.
10.
Thomas Locano had a nice suite of offices on the second floor of a two-story building overlooking Mission Street in South Pasadena. His was an older building with a red tile roof, plaster walls, and heavy wooden doors. Like the building, Locano was a gracious man in his early sixties. Two younger associates were employed in his practice, and his assistant was also his wife. Elizabeth, she told me as she led me into his office.
Locano smiled when he stood to greet me, but appeared uncomfortable.
Elizabeth Locano said, “Would you like coffee, Mr. Cole? Or something else?”
“I’m fine, ma’am. Thank you.”
She did not close the door on the way out.
Mr. Locano came from behind his desk so we could sit together in comfortable, overstuffed chairs, and offered a firm, dry hand.
“Nita tells me you’re working for her, and are aware of her status issue.”
“Yes, sir, I am. Did she tell you why I’m here?”
“Her daughter is missing. She believes it has something to do with her status, so she asked me to speak freely with you about these things.”
I passed him the note from the crash site.
“I found this twenty miles outside of Palm Springs at the crash site of an old drug smuggler’s plane. I believe it was written by Nita’s daughter.”
He frowned at the note, then tried to pass it back, but I didn’t take it.
“This isn’t Spanish.”
“No, sir. We believe it means ‘ask a coyote named Sanchez’ or ‘ask about a coyote named Sanchez.’ So that’s what I’m doing. Do you know of a coyote named Sanchez who brings people north through the Imperial Valley?”
Mr. Locano lowered the note. His cool expression told me I had insulted him.
“My practice is immigration law. I help clients obtain visas and green cards, and fight deportation and removal orders. If you believe I’m involved in something illegal, you misunderstand the nature of my work.”
“That isn’t what I meant to suggest, Mr. Locano. If I sounded that way, I apologize.”
He didn’t look mollified.
“Nita told me you’re the go-to attorney when undocumented aliens are arrested, so I’m guessing you’re familiar with how your clients enter this country, and who brings them across.”
“This is not something I’m going to discuss with you.”
I pointed at the note.
“Ask the coyote, Sanchez. Nita Morales saw the crash site when she was seven years old, and being smuggled into this country. She says it used to be a regular transfer spot where people brought north were handed off. Krista visited that same site this past Friday night, and it was the last time anyone has seen her. Today, six days later, I found this note and her driver’s license ten yards from the wreckage.”
He glanced at the note again, and frowned. This time when he offered it back, I took it.
“You believe she had contact with this person, Sanchez?”
“Maybe, but I don’t know. Either way, she wrote this note for a reason, so I want to ask him about it. I need a first name to find him.”
Locano nodded, but more to himself than me.
“I would like to help you, Mr. Cole, but this business you speak of is not what it was.”
“Are you telling me no one comes north anymore?”
“Of course people come, but the guides I knew are gone. The old guides were a cousin who had come to work the seasonal crops, or an in-law who came to visit relatives. If you gave them a few dollars they would help you, as much out of friendship as for the money, but the cartels and their hoodlums have changed this. They patrol the roads like an army to control the movement of guns and drugs, and now nothing comes north without their permission.”
“Including the coyotes?”
“Transporting people is big business now. Groups from Asia, Europe, and the Middle East find passage to Central America, and are taken north through Mexico in large groups. The new coyotes don’t even call them people. They are pollos. Chickens. Not even human.”
“Coyotes eat chickens.”
“Not only chickens, but each other, and each other’s chickens. Do you know what a bajadore is?”
“A bandit?”
“A bandit who steals from other bandits. These are usually members of different cartels, a Baja stealing from a Zeta, a member of the Tijuana cartel stealing from a Sinaloa or La Familia. They s
teal each other’s drugs, guns, and pollos—whatever can be sold. They even steal each other.”
“Sold. As in slavery?”
“Sold as in ransom. These poor people have already paid their money to the coyote, then they are kidnapped by the bajadores. They have nothing, so the bajadores demand ransom from their families. I do not know people like this. When they are arrested, I do not represent them.”
I felt my mouth dry as I took in what he told me.
“Nita received two calls from Krista and a male individual, the man demanding a fee for Krista’s return. Nita transferred the money, but Krista is still missing.”
Locano’s eyes grew darker.
“Nita said nothing of an abduction.”
“Nita believes it’s a joke or a scam. They only asked for five hundred dollars.”
Locano looked even more disturbed.
“This is small to you and a woman with a successful business, but it is a fortune to a family counting pennies. We are talking about poor people. A few hundred, a thousand, another five hundred. The bajadores know with whom they are dealing.”
“It still seems so little.”
“Multiply it times a thousand. Two thousand. The number of people abducted would astound you, but such abductions are rare on U.S. soil. Let’s hope Nita is right.”
Neither of us spoke for a moment, neither of us moved as I listened to the voices in his outer office, his wife speaking with one of the younger attorneys.
“Mr. Locano, you may not know this man, but you might know someone who does, or who can find out. Ask around. Please.”
He stared at me, and I could tell he was thinking. He tapped the arm of his chair, then called to his wife.
“Liz. Would you show Mr. Cole to the restroom, please?”
He stood, and I stood with him as his wife appeared in the door.
“Take your time. Wash thoroughly. It is important to be clean, don’t you agree?”
“It’s important to be clean.”
“Take your time.”
Elizabeth Locano graciously showed me to the restroom, where I took my time. It was a nice restroom, with large framed photographs of the pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacán in southern Mexico, what the Aztecs called the City of the Gods. It was and remains one of the most beautiful cities ever built, and one I have always wanted to see. I wondered if Mr. Locano or his wife had taken them.
I washed thoroughly, then washed a second time because cleanliness was a very good thing, and it was right to be good. Mr. Locano was on the other side of the door talking over my request with his wife, and maybe making the calls I had asked him to make. I hoped so.
I was staring at the Pyramid of the Sun when my phone buzzed.
Mary Sue Osborne said, “This is your future wife speaking.”
You see how they won’t quit?
“What’s up?”
“Okay, I went through her research. I didn’t see anything about anyone named Sanchez, coyote or otherwise. Sorry, dude.”
This meant I was down to Mr. Locano. If he couldn’t or wouldn’t come through, Q coy Sanchez would go nowhere.
I was thanking her when my phone buzzed with an incoming call, and this time I saw it was Pike.
“Gotta go, Mary Sue. Thanks.”
“No chitchat? No flirty repartee?”
I switched calls to Pike.
“Elvis Cole Detective Agency, the cleanest dick in the business.”
“It’s worse than you thought.”
I stared at the Avenue of the Dead while Pike told me.
Joe Pike:
six days after they were taken
11.
Joe Pike watched his friend Elvis Cole leave the Burger King parking lot, then entered the longitude and latitude into his GPS. Pike was not using a civilian GPS. He used a military handheld known as a Defense Advanced GPS Receiver, which was also known as a dagger. The DAGR was missile-guidance precise, could not be jammed, and contained the cryptography to use the Army and Air Force GPS satellite system. The DAGR was illegal for civilians to own, but Pike had used it in remote locations throughout Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Central and South America. These were military contract jobs for multinational corporations, mostly, but also the United States government. The government gave the DAGR to him even though it was a crime for him to own it. Governments do that.
Thirty-two minutes later, Pike slid from his Jeep onto a dirt road a hundred yards from the broken airplane and the overgrown landing strip behind it. Pike considered the airplane, then the surrounding land. The landing strip was obvious. The smugglers had smoothed a forty-foot-wide piece of desert for twenty-five hundred feet, pushing their rubble into a low berm along the runway’s length. Now, all these years later, though the creosote bushes and bunchgrass returned, the landing strip created an unnaturally flat table of land with an unnaturally straight edge.
Pike took a deep breath, and waited for the desert’s silence. The Jeep ticked and pinged, but the desert swallowed these sounds as deserts will do, muting them with its emptiness. Deserts held an emptiness that could not be filled, and as the metal cooled, the pops and knocks slowed like a clock running down until the desert was silent.
Pike took another breath, expanding his lungs ever farther, and slowed his heart. Forty-four beats per minute. Forty-two. Forty. Pike wanted to be as still and silent as the desert. The best hunters were one with the land.
Pike made his way through the cholla and creosote, and quickly located the remains of the fire Cole described and the tire print marked with an E. This would be Trehorn’s track, with his friend’s track next to it. Pike thought of these tracks as “friendlies,” and would ignore them if he saw them elsewhere in the area.
Once the two friendly tracks were identified, Pike searched for the oversized quad tracks Cole described. These signs were not easy to find, the way you could see tracks on a sandy beach. The desert hardpack was made of shale plates scattered with sand, rocks, and sun-baked dirt. Though an occasional puddle of sandy soil held a clear track, the signs Pike found were mostly a few inches of thin line on a rock or a shadow pressed into the sand.
Pike worked carefully, and did not hurry. He eased into a push-up position, lowered his head, then changed position and lowered himself again. During his contract years, he was often hired to protect African villages and farm collectives from raiders and poachers. These missions involved tracking dangerous men through vast tracts of mopane scrub or arid savannah. Pike hired Masai warriors to track them. These were lean, mystical men who would study the tilt of a reed for an hour or touch a tree as if they could feel the heat left by a passing Bantu. They claimed the trees and grass spoke to them, and tried to teach Pike what they saw—be one with these things, and you will see without looking. Pike never heard voices or saw what they saw, but he learned what to look for, and that a man needed patience to find it. Joe Pike was patient.
He found three nine-millimeter casings almost at once, glittering like small copper mirrors. He found clear prints left by two pickup-sized vehicles, fragments of three different shoe prints, and then found the quad. Cole was right—two big tires mounted side by side, each maybe ten inches wide. A large truck had been here in a place where large trucks did not belong. Pike studied the dual tracks, and noted they lined up with the centerline of the landing strip. He followed them, noting more fragments of smaller treads, some crushed by the quad tracks, others cutting across them. The smaller tracks didn’t follow a straight course, but swerved and curved into the brush. Some of these tracks showed a sideways skid as if the vehicles had been moving fast. Pike wondered why they had turned hard into the brush, but kept following the quad.
Twenty yards past the dead airplane, the quad tracks curved toward the road where his Jeep now waited. Pike thought this was probably how the truck left, so he reversed course, and followed the tracks in the opposite direction back past the airplane.
He was thirty yards beyond the crash when the clearing was s
uddenly crowded with shoe prints; mostly fragments—the crest of a heel, the edge of a shoe—but enough to see differences in their sizes and soles. The shoe prints overlapped as if many people had stood in a group. Pike lowered himself to study them more closely, and realized the shoe prints completely covered the quad prints. This meant the people were here after the truck.
Something about this bothered him, so Pike backtracked a few feet the way he had come, and discovered the tracks leading to the road were clear. A few feet farther away from the road, and overlapping shoe prints covered the tracks. The line between shoes and no shoes on the quad tracks was clear.
Pike realized he now knew the truck had come from the south, rolled up the centerline to this spot near the crashed airplane, and stopped. A group of people had gotten off or gotten on at the rear of the truck, after which the truck departed toward the road where his Jeep was now parked.
Pike said, “Mm.”
Pike searched for a depression where the truck’s weight would have pressed into the soil when it sat parked. He located the first depression, then two of the remaining three. He paced off the distance between the rear tires and the fronts, which gave him the wheel base. The truck was about twenty feet long with a fourteen-foot box. This was about the size used for local meat deliveries or rented to do-it-yourself movers.
Pike was considering the size of the truck when he noticed a long arcing skid where one of the smaller vehicles crushed a cluster of furry cholla cactus as it raced into the brush. Pike left the quad for a closer look, and saw a path of broken ocotillos and creosote. The creosotes were large, heavy plants, and would have damaged the vehicle, but the driver hadn’t cared. Five more nine-millimeter casings were scattered along the hardpack.
The smaller track was easy to follow. Broken shrubs and deep ruts where the tires dug for traction led in a curving arc through the brush. Forty yards from the landing strip, Pike found four deep sideways skids where the vehicle made a hard, sliding stop. A few feet away, Pike spotted seven nine-millimeter casings and three yellow shotgun shells. Someone had driven hard to this place, stood on the brakes, then fired off rounds. Two guns, so Pike guessed two men. Chased something. Caught it. Killed it.
